Does anyone remember when this person who worked for Mr Beast outed their fraudulent tactics? You couldn’t bring it up in a comment on their videos at all. They had a team continuous censoring all honest discussion on their videos. I find the whole phenomenon around Beast to be gross.
Interestingly, this HN post is now on page 3 with ~300 points in an hour. Which probably means it's been flagged a bunch of times if I understand the HN ranking algorithm. Either that or the mod team has demoted it but that doesn't seem likely in this case.
I agree, but at least it was possible to tell he probably plays fast and loose with the truth and would probably do almost anything for more money or more applause simply by watching a few minutes of his videos, or at least that was my experience.
As I get older and gain first-hand experience in the orbit of some extremely successful people, I'm starting to realize that what I believed about how to succeed appears to be quite the opposite of what I've believed for most of my life, at least anecdotally. I've been bummed to realize how manipulative and dishonest the most successful people I've known have tended to be. I think hard work, integrity, conscientiousness, etc will get you pretty far in life, but there seems to be a certain threshold level of success that starts to favor the Machiavellian types.
Almost all "successful" people in white collar jobs are just better sociopaths than the ones below them. That's pretty much it.
Hard work is somewhat necessary at the start to buy you legitimacy (aka school & diploma) but it's not really a big difference maker after that.
In fact, I would say that if you work hard and produce great work this pretty much guarantees that you'll never evolve past a certain level.
I think that's actually the major difference maker for rich people: they got there that way and demonstrate how things work to their children who integrate the concept intuitively.
I'm finding these allegations of "fraud" to be extremely convoluted and all over the map, sharing more with internet conspiracy theorizing than sober allegations of specific harms. Some of the issues in the video and elsewhere, present longstanding staples of junk food marketing (e.g. cash prizes, vacations) as if they're in the category of crimes, which is nonsense and shows no sense of proportionality.
I also think the linked video got pretty ridiculous pointing to CGI explosions or edited in buildings evidence of "faked videos" when I think, again, not crime, and not even importantly misleading in the sense people usually are talking about when talking about faked videos: e.g. bigfoot being a guy in a costume. The kind of thing I would consider violating the contract with the viewer would be something more like integrity of outcomes in competitions.
Which is to say, the community of critics are some of the worst cases of deep friend internet brain imaginable, spinning narratives in a Trump-style "weave" [0] that can't decide what the issue is, and can't differentiate between importantly different categories of harm. Most of the time it's vague characterizations of "shady" without elaboration, which itself signals the kind of vagueness that people mistakenly think constitute a completely expressed idea.
That's why this article, at least, by contrast is able to coherently articulate a harm, but even that is fringey, pertaining to pinned comments did not comply with "CARU’s Ad Guidelines’." But at least, it models what it looks like to present a coherently stated harm.
Sorry but I'm just seeing this reply now. He did have "receipts" in the videos to back up his points. You can always watch the videos and see for yourself.
https://youtu.be/k5xf40KrK3I